One of the things we love about our office is the large classroom that we built for it.

It’s been great for holding “AWeber University” classes (where our team members share their expertise on specific areas of AWeber, email marketing topics, providing outstanding customer support and more with the rest of us) as well as project development and brainstorming sessions.

These are great, but one main reason we built the classroom was to have a space where we could bring in businesses and members of our community to learn and to share ideas. But for nearly a year, we held off on hosting an event.

Recently, we found an opportunity to share our home with a customer and members of our local community – and we’re glad we did.

Thanks to All Who Attended!

We’re excited to have helped Chris on his tour, and we’re grateful to everyone who came out and helped us break in our classroom with our first meetup.

Hopefully this’ll be the first of many great events at AWeber!

Do you hold small business and/or entrepreneurial talks, Meetups, etc. in the Philadelphia area? Interested in holding one at AWeber? Contact us with details about your organization and what you’d like to use the space for.

We see, share and discuss a lot of links throughout the week… more than we could ever write articles about. Link Tank is our way of showing you some of the interesting, useful, thought-provoking and other eye-catching stuff we come across. For more of these, see the Link Tank tag.

As I noted in that post, “If you’re not providing value to subscribers, their actions with your messages will reflect that. ISPs track what’s done with your messages, and can choose to filter you out if they find you’re not ‘what the consumer wants.'”

This week, Gmail announced a new feature that makes this a reality.

Introducing The Priority Inbox

To manage our overflowing inboxes, a lot of people already sort email into groups of emails to read and respond to now, later or never. (Your own groups’ names may vary, or you may not even have a specific system like that… but I’d bet you read emails from certain people more often and/or more quickly.)

“So Do My Marketing Emails All Go Into The “Everything Else” Pile Now?”

Not necessarily, but consider the examples in the Gmail video… note whose email is getting prioritized (email from contacts, friends, people you email back and forth with regularly) and whose is not (the “Special Offer” email).

It’s early to make predictions about what all of this means – or if it will even stick around as a feature. You never know, Gmail users might end up not liking it (although I tend to doubt that’ll be the case).

That said, it’s clear that whatever the future of the Priority Inbox holds, ISPs are continuing to move toward creating systems that reward email that people want at the expense of email people don’t want. (Gmail isn’t the first to try this – the same sort of thing is happening at Yahoo! and Windows Live Hotmail.)

What this should tell you is that you need to take a long, hard look at whether your emails are something your subscribers really want. Because if they aren’t, you’re going to find it harder over time to continue getting them opened and clicked.

At AWeber, we see, share and discuss a lot of links throughout the week… more than we could ever write articles about. So to give you an idea of what we’re reading and talking about (mostly, but not always, about marketing), we’re going to share a few of those links here.

This is an experiment, so if you like it and want us to do more of these, please leave a comment or share/retweet this. Thanks, and enjoy!

If you’re like most people reading this blog, you love data. Not this Data, but the kind that paints a picture of what is and isn’t working in your email marketing.

The trouble with data, of course, is that sometimes it’s hard to know which data is important and worth focusing on. Not to mention that for it to be valuable, the data has to be actionable, too.

Last week we leaked some information about a soon-to-be-released tool that not only helps you see how your email marketing campaigns perform, but also makes it easy to take action to increase your response rates and conversions.

And now, it’s here.

Announcing Broadcast QuickStats

QuickStats makes it easy to understand how your broadcasts performed by showing you:

Opens

Clicks

Web Hits/Traffic

Unsubscribes

Some screenshots of QuickStats (click to see full-size images):

Even better, you can use the data to identify responsive and non-responsive groups of subscribers – those people who:

What Do You Think?

How will being able to see at a glance how your broadcasts perform, identify potentially profitable subscriber segments, and quickly and easily create and deliver targeted campaigns to them affect your business?

Small Businesses Investing More in Email Marketing, Look to Integrate Social Media

Huntingdon Valley, Pa. (June 23, 2010) - AWeber Communications, a leading provider of web-based email marketing software for small businesses, today announced results from a survey of more than 2,500 small businesses regarding email marketing and social media marketing efforts. Email marketing continues to bring significant value to businesses with more than 82 percent of respondents planning to increase their email marketing efforts over the next year.

The survey, generated by AWeber and initially reported by eMarketer, indicates that the more social media grows in popularity among consumers, the more attention it will receive from marketers. While it may not be entirely clear how marketers are incorporating social media into their existing digital marketing efforts such as email marketing, almost 70 percent of small business marketers are employing some sort of social media tactics and a majority (77 percent) indicate that integrating email marketing and social media is either “very important” or “moderately important.”

The most popular tactics at the moment involve spreading content onto additional mediums such as sharing email newsletters on Twitter (36 percent) and delivering blog posts via email (35 percent). Small business marketers seem to recognize the value in driving social media followers and fans to their email lists and vice versa – allowing subscribers to access information from the medium they are most comfortable with.

“As the survey results indicate, email marketing continues to be a measurable, effective tool that brings significant value to small businesses, regardless of the nature of their business,” said Tom Kulzer, CEO and founder of AWeber. “It is also evident that marketers are continuing to realize the importance of integrating their email marketing campaigns with social media activities as a way to reach a broader audience, but are still learning how to do this effectively. We continue to provide our users with educational resources, including our blog and webinars to help them better understand how to engage with their customers.”

Another interesting finding from the survey centered on behavioral targeting, a method considered help deliver superior results. By specifically targeting email campaigns toward subscribers who have taken an action (opened a particular email, clicked on a link), nearly 50 percent of respondents indicated that behavioral targeting increases their conversion rates either significantly or moderately.

These responses also highlight a divide between email marketers who are testing behavioral targeting and those who are not. Nearly a quarter (24.8 percent) of respondents state that they have not tested behavioral targeting in their email marketing campaigns, while another 23 percent are not sure whether behavioral targeting increases conversion rates – a number which suggests that marketers may not be testing this thoroughly, if at all.

However, this divide may be shrinking, as an overwhelming majority of respondents (71.4 percent) plan to increase their focus on behavioral targeting in their email campaigns over the next year.

As the ongoing battle for subscribers’ attention escalates, relevance and value are at a premium making analytical date more valuable than ever. Nearly 70 percent of respondents indicate that analytical reports either significantly or moderately impact their email marketing strategies. Of the marketers who do not currently use these reports, more than one quarter are interested in using them.

Other key findings from the AWeber survey include:

More than 66 percent of respondents indicate they intend to use behavioral targeting as well as sales tracking in their campaigns over the next 12 months.

54 percent of respondents indicate they intend to use Facebook as a tool to help build their email lists

Almost 12 times as many respondents said that email marketing ROI is more easily measured than social media ROI (61.46 percent versus 5.28 percent)

MethodologyThe AWeber survey was conducted over a five-day period from May 20-24. Responses were entered anonymously by 2,579 AWeber customers. Based on the population size and the number of respondents, responses can be reported with a 99% confidence level with a margin of error of +/- three percent.

For more information, including full survey results and the executive summary, contact Justin Premick, Director of Education Marketing at justinpremick@aweber.com.

About AWeber CommunicationsAWeber Communications helps businesses increase sales and profits through its suite of web-based email marketing software. The privately held, debt-free company was founded in 1998. For more information, visit http://www.aweber.com.

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Thanks To Everyone Who Participated In The Survey!

To all of you who took a few minutes out of your day to answer our survey last month, thanks so much!

Hopefully it’s useful and motivating to see how your email marketing efforts and usage compare to those of other small businesses.